Elizabeth Smart calls being a new mom ‘the best thing ever,’ feels her kidnapping made her more compassionate

Activist Elizabeth Smart is still getting the best revenge imaginable on the sickos who kidnapped her: Living a happy life.

Activist Elizabeth Smart is still getting the best revenge imaginable on the sickos who kidnapped her as a teenager: Living a happy life.

The new mother, who turned 28 last week, said her mother advised her long ago that living well was the only way to get past the horrors of her youth.

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"What she said was... 'Elizabeth, what these people have done to you is terrible, and there aren't words strong enough to describe how wicked and evil they are," Smart told a crowd of hundreds during an hour-long talk at the Oklahoma City Golf & Country Club last week.

Elizabeth Smart seen in April, holding a photo of a missing woman from Mexico, Elizabeth Elena Laguna Salgado. (Rick Bowmer/AP)

"They've stolen nine months of your life from you that you will never get back. But the best punishment you could ever give them is to be happy, is to live your life, is to move forward and do all of the things that you want to do. Because by feeling sorry for yourself and holding onto the past and reliving it over and over and over again, that's only allowing them to steal more of your life away from you, and they don't deserve that. They don't deserve another single second more of your life."

The Daily News cover from March 14, 2003, after Smart was returned to her family. (Daily News)

A handout photo of the teenaged Smart after she was taken from her home in 2002. (HO/REUTERS)

This year, Smart has enjoyed a much happier nine-month experience: Her new life as a mother. She and her husband Matthew Gilmour had their first child, Chloe, in February.

She told The Oklahoman on Monday her baby girl is "the best thing ever."

"It's probably made me like the most paranoid, overprotective, annoying parent ever," she said.

"I'm definitely given a whole new depth of feeling about everything."

Smart was snatched out of her family's Salt Lake City home in June 2002, when she was 14. Her captors, Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Ileen Barzee, kept her captive in Utah for nine months, with Mitchell ritually raping the teen, tying her up and often abusing her several times daily.

Authorities found Smart traveling with her kidnappers, disguised with a wig and veil, in March 2003. Mitchell is now serving two life sentences in federal prison and his accomplice was sentenced to 15 years behind bars.

Since her heroic escape, Smart started the Elizabeth Smart Foundation to combat sex crimes and human trafficking. She published a memoir, "My Story," in 2013, and continues to regularly share her story in speeches.

Even so, she says she's learned to put her past in its place.

"It's not something that I sit and think about every day," she told The Oklahoman.

"Like, I talk about it because I want to, and I think about it because I want to...I do believe it made me a much more compassionate person."